LATEST ISSUE

The final AJ of the year looks back at the past 12 months and forward to the year ahead. We review 2018’s key architectural events and trends and preview the stories set to dominate the new year. We also pick out the people to watch in 2019 and highlight eight key buildings set to complete. And to make sure you’ve been paying attention, there’s a Christmas quiz on the events that shook the architectural world in 2018 and a chance to play spot the building. PLUS a building study of Karakusevic ..

Parametricism? How quaint

Parametric architecture’s abstract hubris lies in ruins, but Sam Jacob finds it all rather picturesque

Every success harbours the seeds of its own failure. Somewhere in the hubristic peak of complete accomplishment lurks the complacency, arrogance and absence of doubt that fans the inevitable, all-consuming bonfire of vanities. It’s just this kind of raging self-immolation that has cindered the global economic landscape – in days, the terrainhas been completely transformed.

The speed of transformation has hit built culture hard. The collapse revealed a world undescribed by the maps and charts we had drawn. Buildings find themselves completed in a different landscape, appearing on the skyline like giant mausolea for a failed ideology, or abandoned, half-built, like freshly minted ruins.

The markets had evolved into hyper-sophisticated, super-calibrated, cleverly geared systems whose logistics supported an ever-finer kind of abstraction. They became a machine for manufacturing value and growth in vaporous form, decoupled from substance. Their fall marks the failure of a particular kind of algorithmically programmed fantasy of abstraction.

The AJ supports the architecture industry on a daily basiswith in-depth news analysis, insight into issues that are affecting the industry, comprehensive building studies with technical details and drawings, client profiles, competition updates as well as letting you know who’s won what and why.